Where does containment collide?

A grand strategy that seeks to check a rival power's expansion by steady, long-term counter-pressure at the points where it pushes outward, rather than by direct attack or by conceding ground. The idea is set out in George Kennan's 1947 The Sources of Soviet Conduct, published in Foreign Affairs under the pen name X, which argued for the patient and firm application of counter-force wherever a rival showed signs of encroaching. The referent here is a policy posture between states, judged by whether a rival's reach is held in place over years, and it has nothing to do with a steel-and-concrete shell around a reactor, a mind holding another person's feelings, or the halting of a disease.[1]

Unit

A state's standing policy posture toward a rival, held over years

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Assessed by historians and analysts through the alliances, aid, and deployments a state uses, and by whether a rival's territorial or political reach is held steady

The capacity of one mind to take in, hold, and make bearable another person's raw and overwhelming feelings, returning them in a form the other can begin to think about. Wilfred Bion's 1962 paper A Theory of Thinking described this as a relation between a container and the contained, the model of how a caregiver receives an infant's distress and gives it back digested, an idea close to Donald Winnicott's earlier notion of the holding a parent provides. The referent is a relational and mental function inside and between people, gauged by clinical judgement, and it is not a policy toward a rival, a shell around a reactor, or the stopping of a disease.[2]

Unit

A relational function between two minds, one holding what the other cannot yet bear

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Inferred clinically from what happens in the consulting room, through the analyst's observation of how unbearable feelings are received, held, and returned in a usable form

The public-health effort to stop a pathogen from spreading and drive new cases toward zero, chiefly by finding and isolating infected people, tracing and quarantining their contacts, and cutting the chains of transmission, as distinct from mitigation, which only slows a spread that is accepted as ongoing. Fraser and colleagues' 2004 study Factors That Make an Infectious Disease Outbreak Controllable, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showed that whether these measures can contain an outbreak depends on how much transmission happens before symptoms appear. The referent is a coordinated response to a disease across a population, judged by case counts, and it is not a policy toward a rival state, a reactor shell, or a mind holding feelings.[3]

Unit

A coordinated response to an outbreak, aimed at driving new cases to zero

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Tracked by case counts, the effective reproduction number, contact-tracing coverage, and whether transmission chains are broken